You can't ignore the role of theory in science. Positing concepts to explain phenomena is as central to science, as is putting those ideas to the test...
Let's take gravity as an example. On a Humean account, gravity is just a shorthand for objects behaving in a similar attractive manner, such that bowl...
Our brains honed by evolution in conjunction with the causal environment we perceive. Our brains are necessary to make any sense of raw sensory data, ...
Can you translate General Relativity into set theory? Better yet, can you transform Evolutionary Biology into data sets? I'd love to see how natural s...
No, the problem is that I don't think you can get from brute particulars to any sort of theory, nor do I think brute particulars would behave in any s...
It does, because you have have no justification for coming up with predictive models. Nothing happens for any reason. Just because the sun's always sh...
I think it depends on whether this has a net benefit for society or not, and whether the solution to people motivated in such a way produces a better ...
The question here is whether human beings could learn a concept like causality just from experience, or whether the brain is wired to develop along th...
Not quite obviously, or Plato and Kant wouldn't have objected to that and come up with their own schemes for how knowledge is possible. Yeah and peopl...
I'm not going to get into a semantic argument over when to use why and when to use how. I take scientific explanations to be causal reasons for the re...
The reason for your behavior is because you evolved in a causal environment, where it makes sense for you to understand the consequences for actions t...
And why have we evolved in relatively stable environments? You realize that in order for biological evolution to happen, the physics have the universe...
That's not at all what I mean by asking the why question. I mean the causal reason for why B always follows A, not how to calculate a prediction that ...
Plato, Kant and plenty of others have disagreed with radical empiricism. Sensory impressions alone cannot give you any knowledge. You must be able to ...
But cosmologists do ask and attempt to answer the question as to why the observable universe exists, and how it came to be the way it is. Saying there...
Good point. There needs to be something else to show why A necessarily follows B, but D only follows C by accident. Or to show how correlation differs...
Right, but the point was that Kant saw a big problem with Hume's view of causation, which was that it led to widespread skepticism, and made science i...
That's a much better attempt than mere regularity. Regularity renders everything as brute. The sun could stop shining for no reason, but it just conti...
That still doesn't answer the question as to why the sun would rise hundreds of billions of times in a row. The claims is that there is no reason for ...
Kant doesn't think Hume can do this without causality being a structure of our cognitive capabilities. It's not that we observe B always following A a...
Not sure, but I'm not comfortable with saying facts are out there in the world. There is a close relationship with facts and states of affairs, but th...
True statements regarding empirical conditions have to refer to objective states of affairs other people can verify, however we wish to metaphysically...
It can't just be individual experience per Wittgenstein's no private language argument. Statements of facts must be sociological. Other people agree t...
I have a hard time with the concept that B following A always happens, but it could also not happen. It just so happens in our universe that the sun w...
But the claim was that the sun could cease to rise (shine) tomorrow. That it continues to rise is just a contingency that has always held to this poin...
You've read Madame Guyon? Her stuff is pretty deep. Sort of reminds me of Buddhism in a way, with a Christian interpretation. The whole attempt to ach...
We say we're looking at a tree, because we have an experience of seeing a tree that can be backed by other people, instruments, etc. The tree is empir...
I meant experience to mean anything we're conscious of, which includes mental images. Sometimes those are the result of perception, and sometimes othe...
You don't perceive with just your eyes, although we say you see with your eyes. Cut out your visual cortex, and there will be no visual perception. So...
Your toe doesn't perceive, but it is part of an organism that does. The nerves in your toe feed the tactile and pain signals to your central nervous s...
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